Transatlantic grief

New book. Bergen may not be more beautiful. The wet, cold, clear Byfjord. The yellow-orange October mountains. A dry Thursday light filled with a light shutter-filtered sun.

Ny Tids Bergen correspondent takes the boat from Strilelandet and into the city. Goes the short way from Nøstet and up to Café Opera – the meeting place that claims to have served Bergen's first cappuccino, and which according to itself includes everyone «regardless of color, shape, smell, type, height, weight, gender, job, interest, clothes or religion. "

On the second floor we meet the Chilean, the musician, the Eastlander, the poet, the Bergenser and the current author Pedro Carmona-Alvarez. And the weather changed and it was summer and so on (Kolon Forlag) is coming this fall and already has managed to be criticized.

- It's about how to deal with grief and how people try to live on. You must not, but most people live on, says the author, who himself fled to Norway from the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, via Argentina, together with his parents and a little sister.

The story in his new book is about a Norwegian-American love couple, who lose their two daughters in a dramatic accident in New York in the 1960s. The book is partly told by the couple's third daughter, Marita, who is born in Oslo – in the middle of the returned grief and in the emptiness of her two older sisters.

It is the book of happiness, sorrow and emptiness afterwards. Much is told by the surviving daughter:

"Dad lived in Norway from 67. In Oslo, at Bekkelaget. He and Mom came after the accident, after my sisters had died over there in the States. That was before I was born. Weird of that. How childhood is always common until you grow up and start talking to other people about childhood. Only then do you discover things. All that weird. Only then can you see things clearly. ”

This is the first book in a trilogy and Carmona-Alvarez is in the middle of writing book number two when he meets Ny Tid.

The family arrived in Norway and Oslo at the beginning of the 1980s. He then went to Bergen to become a "rock star", where he has lived for 19 years. He is the Bergensen who speaks Eastland and the poet who became a novelist.

Pan-American heart

As usual, Carmona-Alvarez's book contains a number of musical preferences. The musical protagonist this time is Bruce Springsteen and his New Jersey. But it is not just the novel character Johnny's gradual fascination with the "springstone universe" that makes the book's action add to the west coast of the United States.

- I'm an American, you know, Pedro answers in a kind of artificial Telemark dialect.

And explains further:

-I feel deeply American. I have lived in Norway for 30 years and love the country here and feel at home, but if I go into my tree and underground, my roots go down somewhere else.

- Where do you envision your roots going?

- They go down to the American, not exclusively the Latin American, but the whole continent. My big pan-American heart is growing bigger and bigger, he says enthusiastically.

In Morgenbladet's critical review of the book, the reviewer lets it shine through that he is little interested in this pan-American. "It will greatly help at all whether the reader is overly concerned with America, its people and history, its cultural clichés, myths and dreams," writes the cultural newspaper.

- It is completely fair that critics are not interested in America, but I am interested in American stories, American ways of telling, mythological layers and what it is that makes the American person different from the European person, Carmona-Alvarez answers .

The difference of grief

How does one tell their children about the grief inside them? Johnny's father cannot, but will actually tell and crack at the end. Mother Kari closes the tragedy and grief within herself.

- It's a lot about how you choose to tell your life. How the stories are a fundamental element in our existence and what you pass on to your children from what you have been given as life, says Carmona-Alvarez.

He thinks, looks out the window, on the street below, and the birches in the Theater Park on the other side of the road.

- It becomes clear that the parents handle that task very differently. Johnny finally chooses to tell. He is the one who will never stop talking about his dead children, he says.

And when Johnny bursts into tears in New York, in front of six-year-old Marita, there's something easier:

“But Marita asks, and when Marita asks, things go a bit and Johnny takes a deep breath. And he thinks the girl is also breathing deeply and she keeps asking and he notices that he has no defense, there are no walls around him. Marita asks and Johnny shakes and howls and she has no choice but to become the child who comforts her dad. ”

The difference between American Johnny and European Kari lies there as an unequal friction in the middle of the family. He never stops talking about it. She bears the sorrow in the midst of her heart.

- I have played it down in the book, but it lies as implicit knowledge – that Kari and Johnny react very differently to the daughters' death. His reaction is very American. While Kari chooses a completely different path.

Infinity Project

Thus, from New York and New Jersey, the book's action moves to Norway and the Bekkelaget before it concludes in Bergen. Where the mother and Marita move. Not unlike Carmona-Alvarez himself, who came to Norway as an 11-year-old. He grew up outside Oslo before moving to Bergen in the early 20's and focusing everything on music and band Sister Sonny. Music turned into poetry and he eventually brought poetry to the novel.

- When I moved to Bergen to play in a band, it was no wonder to be Chilean. The strangest thing for people was that I was from the east, he says.

The author still writes music and publishes the album on February 1, 2013 Homegrown with the solo project Moonpedro & The Sinking Ship. While many of his contemporary Norwegian musicians choose to sing in Norwegian, Carmona-Alvarez continues to write songs in English, the language he, after Spanish and Norwegian, initially mastered the least.

- It is very "in" to sing in Norwegian, but I have become so old that what is in and out does not matter. My goal is to be equal at the same time as a rock.

On Valentine's Day, February 14, the Ep is released, The Birthday Tapes, along with a musician colleague, with five cover songs dedicated to sisters and boyfriends. However, the biggest musical project is a deconstruction of the whole White Album for The Beatles. 20 of 33 songs are done, but it is still a long time until the eternity project is completed.

The world opener

The next book in triology will also extend across national borders. There will be a lot of Bergen, a lot of the US, but also Iraq, Mexico and Dubai.

- Why is it important for you to bring the world into your stories?

- It has first and foremost become important to take the world into myself. I think people should go out to learn a few foreign languages ​​and read works by Koreans or Chinese. Read some people from places other than New York and London. Read some Bulgarians, sit down and listen to gypsy songs and think "ka det går i". Make the world a little bigger. The world is damn hard.

Carmona-Alvarez was also the editor, along with Gunnar Værnes, for the anthology of poetry The world is not on the map (Publisher October, 2010). Here they collected and translated poetry from 25 different countries, with poets such as Syrian Adonis, Nigerian Wole Soyinka and American Sharon Olds.

- My experience with the book of poems is that the world opens up in an insanely nice way in poetry. At the same time, we saw the same basic things man goes around pondering all over the world. Regardless of whether they live in Lebanon, Israel, Norway or Spain.

- What do people have in common?

- These are the difficult things. What we laughed at when we were 25. Life, death and love. That's what people do, sort of. People live and die. And inside there they live their lives. But people do things differently and that's very nice.

And continues:

- We must learn that there is an almost unbearable cultural and economic arrogance in the world we live in. We see ourselves as the top of the wreath cake and believe we are the best history has managed to produce. Then suddenly you read the Mayan Bible, Popol Vuh, and find knowledge, recognition and humanity that is absolutely amazing. And it was written long before Vigdis Hjort's new novel, somehow.

- We must try to write ourselves a little out of the equation and see what starts to sound then.

We get up, walk outside and through the Theater Park, cross Ole Bulls Plass and the Torgalmenningen and down the Fish Market to Bryggen. Throughout the city, the reasoning also ends.

- I often envy people who have their roots here, four generations back in time. Those who have their dead in Norway. I do not have that, and therefore have no affiliation with the earth here. My books therefore try to grow into all the other places where an affiliation can be found, Pedro Carmona-Alvarez concludes. ■

(This is an excerpt from Ny Tid's weekly magazine 26.10.2012. Read the whole thing by buying Ny Tid in newspaper retailers all over the country, or by subscribing to Ny Tid -click here. Subscribers receive previous editions free of charge as PDF.)